Professional support boosts benefit of blood pressure self-monitoring While home blood pressure monitoring is known to help treat patients with hypertension, how best to implement this remains unclear. New PLOS Medicine research suggests that people who monitor their own blood…

Recent PLOS ONE research reveals nefarious partner-swapping practices in a newly discovered hermit crab species. Hermit crabs usually scavenge empty shells on the seabed and use them as mobile homes, but this species, Diogenes heteropsammicola, instead appears to set up…

Zika virus — carried by Aedes aegypti mosquitos in select tropical and subtropical regions of the world — is often transmitted indoors in developing countries. But in the United States, the majority of mosquito bites occur outdoors. Therefore, local patterns…

“Spin” prevalent in biomedical research papers A PLOS Biology study which examined 35 published meta-analyses and systematic reviews of spin has found that this science hype is prevalent across biomedical studies. While it was difficult to consistently define spin, the study found…

Human walking has been studied extensively, but there has been less work on how people adapt their gaits while coupled by a mechanical link such as carrying an object together. Jessica Lanini from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in…

Genome study suggests humans may still be evolving A recently published study in PLOS Biology suggests that humans may still be evolving. Researchers analyzed harmful genetic variants in the genomes of 210,000 people in the United States and Britain, and…

We’ve all seen busy bees hard at work. They fly from one flower to the next collecting pollen to feed their offspring. As they toil to feed their young, bees are also playing a vital role in flower reproduction. While both roles are critically…